Memoirs of Lloyd Moss: 1928

This New Year's Eve I went to the Santa Ana Cabaret which was just outside the Manila city limits and danced until five o'clock in the morning. The wooden fram building was so larg that they had an orchestra set up on a stage at both ends and although they played different music it didn't seem to interfere one with the other. The tables and chairs were set all along the sides and there was a series of arches made of criss-crossed wood laths covered with flowers across the middle of the hall. The girls were almost all Philippino taxi dancers, that is we bought tickets for each dance and gave them to the girls when we went out onto the floor, just like Roseland in New York. At midnight the crowd went crazy throwing firecrickers around the floor and you had to be very agile to keep one from exploding under your feet. It was like a battlefield for awhile until the fireworks ran out. Almost everyone drank quarts of San Miguel beer except the girls who did the usual coaxing to have us buy them fake cocktails for which they got percentages from the management.

The first of January I signed up to extend my enlistment for another year as there was much more of the Orient that I wanted to see. All through January and the first week of February the ship maneuvered around Manila Bay, Mariveles Bay and Subic Bay for battle practice and we had quite a lot of time for liberty ashore in Manila. One weekend I took a train trip down to Batangas and the Lake Taal volcano which was very interesting, but on the trip back late at night I was badly frightened when a large rock crashed through the train window and smashed against the compartment wall just above my head. I very quickly changed to the opposite seat which seemed much safer and tried to get some sleep for the rest of the ride, but it was difficult.

On the 9th of February the ship left on a trip designed to explore some largely uninhabited islands for the War Department. This was south of Manila in an area called Malampaya Sound. Certain officers went ashore with parties of armed men and sketched maps, made notes of the kind of terrain, possibilities for landing fields, boat harbors etc. Some of the islands were rather weird. One consisted almost entirely of serried rows of sharp rock ridges and the rock material was such that a piece held up and struck would ring like a bell. Some of the islands had cocoanut trees on them and we fund out that it is very hard to shoot a cocoanut out of a tree with a forty-five caliber revolver. Another cruiser, I believe it was the Cincinnati, was making the survey with us and one of it's sailors just disappeared when on a hike inland from the beach. We never found out what happened to him. Next we cruised south to the Sulu Archipelago and stopped at the islands of Bongao and Tawitawi. I didn't go ashore there. At one pont we were close to the port of Dent Haven on the island of Borneo. Then we went north again to Zamboanga the southernmost city in Mindanao. This was the most interesting stop and we were there for several days. The coastal area is all cocoanut trees with the town sort of peeking out from under the green cover. It was a very peaceful place that had the air of relaxing from a previous, more active time. There were street-car rails that were overgrown with plants and no cars or need of them that I could see. There were hard-packed paths back among the cocoanut trees and I hired a bicycle and rode around for miles in the cool shade. Once I came over a little ridge and there, under a waterfall, was a group of native women bathing. My sudden appearance created consternation among them so I thought it prudent to just keep on pedaling along as though nothing had happened. At one of the tree-shaded beaches I found, among the outriggers, an odd wooden sailboat, shaped like a turtle, with a rounded top and one small hatch for entering. It was so obvious that it wasn't built in the Philippines that I checked with a storekeeper nearby and found that it had come over from California some years before, landed at an unfriendly island in the area and the natives had eaten the captain. In one jewelry store they sold very nice articles made of polished black coral and coin silver. This was the only place that I have ever found black coral.